HIPPOCRATES—GALEN—WHOLESOME FISH 279 
rid himself.1. Perhaps a secondary motive was not absent, 
viz. the desire to avoid the taunt so often levelled at medical 
men : 
dAXAwv iatpds attds EXxeow Bpvetsy 
which Urquhart in his Rabelais translates, 
“He boasts of healing poor and rich, 
Yet is himself all over itch!” 
As regards fish as a diet in health and sickness, quot medict, 
tot sententie seems hardly exaggeration. Their wondrous 
unanimity as regards the food-properties of the Eel amazes, 
for with fish it was usually a case “ where doctors disagree.’’ 
The ‘‘ Father of Medicine,” in denouncing its use (especially 
in pulmonary cases) was followed by nearly all medical writers, 
some of whom, however, were not slow, when otherwise differing 
from him, to assert that he killed more folk than he saved by 
his practice of leaving Nature to effect its cure. Paulus 
Jovius sums up historically the medical attitude towards 
Eels: ‘‘ abhorred in all places and at all times, all physicians 
do detest them, especially about the solstice.” 
As Galen’s dictum ? that fish afford the most desirable food 
for “the idle, the old, the sick, and the silly ”’ embraces the 
majority—if we allow Carlyle’s ‘‘ mostly fools ’—of mankind, 
it would be idle to pursue the dietetic side, were it not for the 
distinguos (to use the old Schoolman’s term) as to which fishes 
fell within or without the Mysian’s category. 
Diphilus (with Philotimus and others) speaks disparagingly 
of some, but highly recommends others. Habitat alone, he 
urged, formed the deciding line between the clean and unclean. 
His Treatise on Food for the Well and Ill * divides sea-fish into 
(A) those which keep near the rocks—these, in his words, “ are 
easily digested, juicy, purgative, light, but not very nutritious ” 
—and (B) those which haunt deep water—these are “ much 
1 Empedocles, albeit no doctor, is said to have delivered Selinus in Sicily 
from malaria by drainage, etc., and so roughly anticipated the triumphs of 
Ross and Gorgas over the mosquito by some 2400 years. See Diog. Laert.' 
VIII. 70, s.v. ‘‘Empedocles.” 
2 De Alim. Fac., 3, 28. Cf. De Alttenuante victus vatione, vol. vi. ed. 
Chartier, which confirms and amplifies the above. 
8 Athen., op. cit., VIII., chs. 51-56, which discuss various fishes from a 
health point of view. 
